


Two Ticks in Time

by Bard_of_Heart



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Red Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:27:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bard_of_Heart/pseuds/Bard_of_Heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia talks about time a lot, and by extension death, and she tells you that she’s decided she doesn’t want to die again.</p><p>“I’m really just done with dying,” she says, matter of fact. “It’s happened way too many times, and I like living too much to stop now!”</p><p>You decide that’s what you’re going to do too. You don’t blame her for being sick of dying. You’re sick of death too.</p><p>“Sounds like a plan,” you tell her and she’s grinning again, so wide it’s like she’s forgotten how to smile, and now she’s learning again. Maybe she has forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Ticks in Time

**Author's Note:**

> Just a heads up before you read. 
> 
> This fic was written just after we learned Aradia and Sollux wouldn't be staying with the other trolls. Thus, the way to get into a dream bubble that I've described here, by sleeping alone, is not true to the information we have now. I'm not going to change it, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew that I wasn't blatantly challenging canon or something!

_“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.”_

-Dion Boucicault

 

Time is unforgiving. It’s one of the things you learn right off the bat. Time doesn’t care that you’re just a thirteen year old kid trying to make it through a day in this crazy messed up world the game created. It doesn’t care that you have a reputation to uphold as strong, chill, and unbreakable, and that you need to be able to hold your team mates together on top of keeping yourself from falling apart. Time certainly does not care about death and how it’s everywhere, dead bodies piling on each other like grotesque mountains, flowing with obscene rivers of your blood.

You’re beginning to hate time. You can see why others would think it was the coolest ability to travel through time, and at first, you did too. Time travel is one of those powers a lot of kids wish they had. It’s not all sunshine and daydreams like everyone seems to think though. You can’t go off and visit presidents or dictators or hang with the dinosaurs. You’ve got responsibilities to uphold, and one little slip up means more mountains of bodies and blood and guts. If you mess up, not only is your life on the line, but other lives too. You learn that pretty quickly on your own, but Davesprite really hammers it into you. He tells you that he screwed up in his timeline. That he let John die and Jade was left behind back on Earth, probably dead too. You can’t afford to make mistakes like that. Your friends are all you have left.

You thought you could do a lot with time; you thought that you could use your powers to fix things and make everything alright. Yeah, that’s true, but you’ve found there are some things you just can’t fix. You couldn’t save Bro, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn’t fix your session, or destroy the green sun, or do anything besides make piles and piles of dead Daves. Even now that you’ve reached God Tier, you’ve never felt more useless. Death is everywhere.

Those three years give you a lot of time to talk with everyone. It’s sort of inevitable that you’d end up having to converse with the trolls too, because John and Jade are off somewhere doing weird space shit together. Although Rose is with you, you can’t handle her snark twenty four-seven, and she’s spending all her time with the vampire chick, Kanaya, lately anyway.

 

One day though, when you’re catching up on your sleep, because fuck do you need it, you find yourself in a dream bubble, and Megido is there, apparently waiting for you. You don’t know her all that well, but she tells you you’ve already had a very long conversation in the past, just you two, and you wrack your brains, but you can’t remember talking to her for a long stretch of time at all. You tell her so, and she laughs. 

“That’s because you were dead!”

Oh, she means one of the dead Daves. You discover the one she’s talking about is the one that took a nap and thought he was going to go god tier. Things didn’t work out for him, and you blink your eyes hard, trying to get his dead body out of your mind. He doesn’t leave. They never do.

“We talked about a lot of things, you and I, but mostly things related to time. That’s what we have in common!”

“Yeah,” you say, and you can’t think of anything much to add. That’s okay though, because Megido is one of the peppiest girls you’ve come across, and she just keeps right on talking.

“That’s why I thought I’d help you, because we’re both in this together. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk more in person. I was really glad to see you're God Tier now, because it means you’re feeling better about your mortality. Am I right?”

What is with this chick?

“I guess. I mean, it was just something that needed to happen. I didn’t really think about it too hard at the time.” You shrug. 

Another memory you don’t particularly like to dwell on. Rose, mature snarky confident Rose, had looked so scared, and what could you say to her? You had no idea if things were going to turn out well. How could you? How could you reassure her when you were just as terrified? There wasn’t anything you could do though. You had to go through with it. A flash of green light. A scream.

Apparently, she takes your answer to mean that yes, absolutely, you’re totally cool with dying now, because she’s grinning like it’s Christmas morning or something. “That is exactly right! There are a lot of things that have to happen before we can beat this game.”

 

You talk to Aradia a lot after that, and escape into the world of dream bubbles, where you don’t have to deal with much, and you can just sort of relax for a while. Part of it is because she’s just a lot easier to deal with than most of the others. She’s peppy sure, but not to the point where it’s annoying, and she’s also pretty intelligent. You don’t talk all that much, but Aradia’s fine with that, and you just let her keep chattering on, throwing in a “yeah,” and a “sure,” and sometimes a “that’s cool,” here and there.

Aradia talks about time a lot, and by extension death, and she tells you that she’s decided she doesn’t want to die again.

“I’m really just done with dying,” she says, matter of fact. “It’s happened way too many times, and I like living too much to stop now!”

You decide that’s what you’re going to do too. You don’t blame her for being sick of dying. You’re sick of death too.

“Sounds like a plan,” you tell her and she’s grinning again, so wide it’s like she’s forgotten how to smile, and now she’s learning again. Maybe she has forgotten.

 

When you arrive in the dream bubble one day, Sollux is there with Aradia, and he pulls you aside. He’s pretty cool you guess, in a weird sort of way, but you’ve never really talked with him all that much.

“Aa says you two have been hanging out a lot recently.” His voice is sort of creepy. It’s hollow, faint, and hesitant, like he’s not sure if he’s actually speaking or not.

“Yeah. I am. Time business and all that.”

“Aa already told me you aren’t time traveling anymore.”

“Look, what’s gotten you so curious about me and Aradia all of a sudden?”

“I care about her,” He says, and he gives you this really searching look like he’s trying to read your mind, and maybe he is for all you know. “What I want to know is, do you?”

You’re not really sure what to say to that. You settle on “She’s a cool chick,” and deliberate a second before adding, “She and I have gotten pretty tight, you know? …That all?”

“Yeah,” Sollux says, and maybe you’re imagining things, but his weird ass alien ears sort of droop, and you think he might have wanted to hear something else, but you have no idea what. “I guess so.”

“What was that all about?” you ask Aradia, once Sollux is out of sight again.

Aradia looks wistfully after Sollux. “He just wants to make sure I’m happy. We were very close once, and he wants to make sure I’m having a good time being friends with you.”

“So, does this mean I have to worry about the jealous ex now? I mean it’s cool, but I don’t really want to fight creepy half dead dudes with ghost powers if I can help it.”

Aradia laughs, and her laughs are the same as her smiles, over eager like this is her first laugh ever, and she can’t wait to do it again. “Not really. He’s concerned, but I can handle this myself!”

You raise an eyebrow. “What exactly are you handling here? Does he do that with all your friends?”

“No, just the special ones.” Aradia says, and winks.

 

You visit her in the dream bubbles even more after that, and you find that your friendship with Aradia is a lot different than the friendships you have with your human buds.

Being around her takes the edge off. You feel like you can talk about things, and even think about things, that you couldn’t with anyone else. She understand you, because she’s been dealing with the same shit you have and she _gets_ it. You can talk about time, and she doesn’t think it’s the coolest ability ever, and she’s not jealous of your way cool time traveling, because she has time in her veins, in her brain, like you, and she _knows._

Listening to Aradia all day, your opinion about time is starting to change.

“It’s not something to hate,” she insists, “it’s something that has to happen. You’re important Dave.” For the first time, you actually believe that you’re useful, that what you’re doing is changing your fate and your friends’ fates too.

She can read you so well, that somehow you just give up on being anything but open with her. She’d just tear whatever you’re hiding out of you anyways, in that matter of fact but bubbly way of hers. You find yourself smiling at her one day, without even realizing it, and you don’t even know how that’s possible. You haven’t smiled like that, really smiled with teeth and everything, since you were a toddler, and certainly not since this damn game started. She sees you smiling before you can cut it out, and she flashes you a bright return smile, pulls you into a hug, and you’re breathless.

“You smiled!” she says, like it’s the greatest thing she’s ever seen. Maybe it is. You hope not.

“Yeah, shit, I guess I did.” Could you be any more awkward? Jesus Christ, Bro is probably cringing in his grave.

“Don’t stop!” She insists and looks up at you with wide rust flecked eyes. “It was nice! Smiles are hard to come by now, and we should treasure them. With an adventure like this on our hands, we need to keep our spirits high!”

 

Spirits high, she says, and you almost believe that’s the only thing she can do, that she’s just naturally good at keeping a smile on her face twenty four-seven. You do believe that, up until you find her curled into herself one day, hiding behind the thin reddish membrane of her wings, her hood pulled down as far as it will go before it tears on her horns.

She’s making this terrible sound, halfway between a sob and something else, a wail of grief maybe, and it makes something in your chest ache and your throat feel tight. 

You’re terrible at comforting others, always have been and always will be, but you keep moving forward, tripping over your own frozen feet until you’re dropping to your knees beside her.

“Aradia,” you breathe, and gently tug on her hood, trying to get her to let go so you can see her face. She relents, and looks up at you.

Her silver eyes are almost completely rusted over now. She told you about this once. Trolls’ eyes change color when they go from teen to adult. It's weird, but you sort of like it on Aradia. The shade of red suits her. Her tears are tinted the same dark red color, and okay yeah that's really weird too, but you push the alien factor to the back of your mind, because you're supposed to be helping her out.

You’ve never seen Aradia upset before, and now that you’ve seen her at her weakest, you wish you hadn’t. More than anything you want to see her revert back to her normal cheerful self, and you want to rip this awful sorrow out of her. This terrible sadness and Aradia do not belong together.

You pull her hood down, and un-tuck her hair, so the thick black locks go tumbling down her back. You don’t ask her to explain, because she never asks you for explanations either. Instead, you run your fingers through her hair in silence.

“I wish I could remember,” she says, so quiet you almost miss it. “There’s so much I’ve forgotten.” She pauses and then cries, “Oh Dave, I’m doing everything wrong! This isn’t how this is supposed to work!”

You have no idea what she’s talking about, and you must have given her a really vacant look, because she’s wiping at her tear stained cheeks, swallowing hard and continuing.

“I’ve managed to screw up all my quadrants. Sollux still pities me, I can tell, but I just can’t remember what it was like before! I want things to be the way they were between us, but I guess I’ve forgotten how romance works. I’ve been messing up with us too, I just know it!”

“Hey, who says you’ve been screwing up? I certainly don’t.”

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” she insists. “You’re my palemate, so I’m supposed to be pacifying you. I’m the stable partner, so it’s my job to keep you from your dangerous tendencies! You’re not a troll though, and you haven’t been killing anyone or doing anything dangerous at all!

“At first, I thought you were a danger to yourself, but, I don’t think you are, at least not anymore. Now, I just want you to be happy and confident in your abilities. That’s not what I’m supposed to be doing at all!” She clasps her hands over her mouth way too late.

The words palemate and romance ring in your ears, but not in the way you expected. It sort of makes sense, like this is what things have been building up towards all along, and you understand now why this feels so different from your other friendships. You don't want to just hang out with Aradia. You want to make sure she's happy and keep her that way, and protect her. Yeah that's true for your other friends of course, but you know they can take care of themselves, and you don't want to be protecting their dumb asses and making them feel good all the time. But that's what you want to do for Aradia. Dammit, how did you miss this?

“So? What does it matter? You’re still helping me okay, and I don’t give a shit about quadrants so who cares what you’re supposed to be doing. Fuck the police we can do what we want.”

Aradia freezes, staring up at you like a deer in headlights, and then she screams in your ear and tackles you to the ground.

“Oof.” You say, monotone. She’s heavier then you are sure, but she’s all curvy softness, not sharp bony points like Terezi.

“Thanks Dave!” she whispers in your ear, and kisses your cheek. All of a sudden, she’s back to her regular, cheerful self. She flashes her million dollar smile your way and you can’t help but turn up your lips at the corners too, just to see that smile get even wider.

“No problem.”

You think you can do this moirallegiance thing.

And hell, while you’re at it, you might as well tackle the time thing too.

 

_“I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.”_

-Golda Meir


End file.
